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Rethinking the shape of gospel ministry?

What will gospel ministry look like in the future? Do we need to rethink what it means to be a full-time minister of the gospel?
For example, it may be that many of us who want to do gospel ministry in the future will need to take paying jobs where most of our time is spent in activity that has nothing to do with gospel ministry. We may have to take these jobs so that we can reach, pastor and encourage the people of God with the spare time we have left.
And then there are those who wont be Anglican rectors.
But that is for another post

Hi Jonathan, obviously I didn’t deliver the punchline well enough.
Round the traps I’ve been hearing a more common acceptance that ministers could take on ‘secular’ work, to pay for the bit they really want to do..ministry.
For some this is a shock and a horror. But then I look at what some Anglican rectors have to do. I look at all the admin. all the baby kissing and handshaking, all the putting out of fires, all the management…and they get to do gospel ministry in the time they have left.
Not a whole lot of difference really.

Actually I think this is a big issue for us. We spend 10-15 years inspiring young men for gospel ministry, training them, stuffing them full of bible smarts, and then we channel them into admin roles for the rest of their lives. They get buried and are never seen again. By their local communities that is.

That’s our leadership strategy as a diocese.

And then we wonder – why isn’t the mission going that well?

There’s a serious, deep-structure problem here isn’t there. It’s not going to be easy to fix.

And I want to suggest it’s part of a broader problem of institutionalisation in our leadership pathway.
But that’s for another day.